THEY were the brave men who never got to serve their country. Packed on to a train, hundreds of Scotsmen had just set off on the first leg of their journey to one of the First World War I’s most infamous battlegrounds, Gallipoli.

But it became the blackest day in British railway history when their train smashed into another loco standing still on the same line.

There was further carnage as a Glasgow-bound express train careered into the wrecked carriages strewn across the tracks at Quintinshill, near Gretna.

The death toll reached 230, most of them Scottish soldiers but also unsuspecting civilians including a mum and her baby son.

Two signalmen, James Tinsley and George Meakin, were blamed. They apparently allowed the troop train to hit the stationary local service, then failed to divert the express train.

But a new book claims they were scapegoats for rail bosses’ failure to plan train movements and greed for profit.

The train carrying soldiers from 7th Battalion Royal Scots was speeding south for Liverpool on May 22, 1915.

As the driver approached Quintinshill signal box, he saw the train in its path and tried to brake – all in vain.

Wreckage was strewn across the tracks, smashing into two goods trains parked in sidings.

The men knew a Glasgow-bound express was due at any minute but inexplicably failed to change the signals.

In The Quintinshill Conspiracy, authors Jack Richards and Adrian Searle say there was no co-ordinated plan to shuttle troops around the country. While train companies still ran prestige expresses, the troops were on sub-standard rolling stock with little thought for safety.

The Royal Scots were crammed into carriages that were still lit by gas.

Local trains and goods trains were shunted into sidings to let them pass. The local Carlisle to Glasgow stopping train was moved to the opposite track to let two expresses by. Sidings either side were full of freight wagons so it couldn’t be shunted there.

Signalmen Tinsley and Meakin were changing shifts when tragedy struck. Tinsley had just got off the local train, which was standing outside the signal box. He told the next signal box the line was clear when it wasn’t and the troop train crashed into the local at 40mph.

Wooden splinters and shards of metal flew across the shattered carriages. The signalmen were transfixed. The troop train was a tinderbox on wheels. Many soldiers died before they could be helped.

Screams of help could be heard and local farmers grabbed what tools they could but there was nothing to extinguish the flames.

The muddle continued as doctors from Dumfries boarded a special train only to be held up because directors of the Caledonian Railway wanted to view the scene.

In Carlisle, nobody thought to call out the local fire brigade such was the confusion. Royal Scots officers shot men who couldn’t be extricated from the wreck rather than consign them to a fiery death.

Two hours after the fire started, the Carlisle fire brigade were dispatched on an awkward 10-mile journey to the crash site.

The dead had been laid out in rows while doctors, who eventually got there, fought to save the living.

Among the killed civilians on the local train was Rachel Nimmo, 28, and her baby son Dickson.

Meanwhile, Meakin and Tinsley were escorted from the signal box by police as casualties were moved to hospitals across Lowland Scotland and north west England.

The unit had been raised in Leith and 106 coffins were sent back to the town for burial in a mass grave. Of the soldiers in the coffins, only 53 could be positively identified.

Meanwhile, Tinsley was questioned and arrested along with Meakin and charged with culpable homicide. Senior officials pointed the finger at both of them but there was no inquiry into their culpability.

Supervision was shoddy at best with company rules being flouted as a matter of course but officials were able to hang the two signalmen out to dry.

During cross-examination at a Carlisle inquest, Meakin admitted it was policy to give the paying expresses priority over troop trains. He was in an impossible situation. When Tinsley and Meakin were tried in Edinburgh, the prosecution evidence was given by company men with no outside experts called. Meakin got 18 months in jail, Tinsley three years.

The National Union of Railwaymen launched a plea for clemency that fell on stony ground because Scottish Secretary Thomas McKinnon Wood sat for a Glasgow constituency that had Caledonian’s works as its centrepiece.

Union leader Jimmy Thomas believed there had been a gross miscarriage of justice but Wood was opposed to any early release.

But later in 1916, Wood was moved to another cabinet post. With the arrival of a new man, Harold Tennant, the men’s sentences were reconsidered.

The trial judge ­recommended Tinsley’s sentence should be cut but Tennant sat on his findings.

Thomas was threatening a rail strike. Ten days later, the men were released.

Tinsley became a porter at Carlisle Citadel and died in 1961 aged 77. Meakin managed to get a job on the railways before being made redundant. He was able to dress well and buy a car before getting a position as a clerk at Gretna ammunition works. The authors believe he was paid by the company to be the fall guy. He died in 1953.